Eadem Mutata Resurgo
by The Black Sluggard
Summary: Most stories have a beginning and an end. Sometimes it's impossible to tell the difference. (Prequel to "Sui Generis".)


It's not exactly like waking up. His eyes aren't closed, for one—in fact, they feel painfully dry, as if he's had them open for a very long time. If anything, it feels more like trying to tune into a radio station by ear. Details just start to become clearer, bit by bit, understanding rising gradually out of meaningless static. Though it happens slowly, it still feels oddly like he is being hit by everything at once, and for a while he can't really make much sense of anything.

The first thing he truly becomes aware of is his breathing. Sharp, deep gasps that, even through the haze, seem unnaturally regular. Fast and deep, a near-mechanical rhythm—_push-_pull-_push-_pull—that makes his lungs ache. He shuts his eyes and tries to slow it down, tears stinging as they well up to soothe the irritated membranes. Slowly, _slowly_ his breathing evens out, and it is only after it does that he can focus on anything else. He is not lying down but kneeling, he realizes, curled in on himself with his arms tucked against his stomach. He can feel grit cutting sharply into the skin of his knees. It strikes him immediately as a very odd position for him to be in, but when he tries to rise out of it his body doesn't seem to want to move. There's a tender ache burning in every muscle, every joint locked with a crippling stiffness. Other than that, he isn't in pain, but he feels a sharp and unwavering certainty that, very recently, he had been.

The fact that he knows that but can't remember _why_ fills him with a formless and confusing sense of dread.

His limbs are trembling just from the effort of trying to stand, so he decides to go with gravity instead, carefully letting himself tip over onto his side. He's not much more comfortable that way, but at least it takes his weight off his knees. Though his arms remain stubbornly in place, he manages to uncurl his legs just a bit. He lies there for a moment, face resting in the sand as he tries to remember what has happened to him. It isn't easy. Whenever he tries to call on the memory there is a strange divide, like double-vision. Everything blurs together, and it's impossible for him to pin anything down.

It isn't until he opens his eyes once again, vision slowly regaining focus, that he sees the wet shadows darkening the sand.

The sight sets his already rapid pulse racing, terror stabbing through him like electricity and leaving an unpleasant, bitter taste on his tongue. Or maybe it's just in the air, that flavor—thick and metallic, it coaxes a sickened swallow from his dust-choked throat. He stares stupidly for a long time, aware of what he is seeing, but somehow unable to find any meaning in it, not until he finally works his arms free from their protective clasp over his abdomen. His hands shake as he raises them into view, crusted with sand and dried blood.

Confronted with the sight, he doesn't know which should worry him more, the memory of pain, or the lack of it. The thought spurs some action into his reluctant muscles, and finally he finds it in him to push himself up onto his hands and knees. Like his hands and arms, the rest of his body is bloody, stuck all over with a coating of dust and sand. He probes carefully with fumbling fingers at his stomach and his sides, his chest, his throat, his head. Each movement sheds a shower of rough grains and dark flakes, but the search yields no evidence that he is injured. The flat of his palm coasts lightly over his left thigh—

He doesn't understand the brief twist of anxiety that worms through his gut when he finds nothing there.

He pushes at that, and almost, _almost_, he manages to grasp at something. He touches on the memory of gunfire, pain, terror—_blood—_but the recollection is still split by the same startling disconnect. Surreal. Like watching the surveillance monitor in a convenience store and seeing yourself act from a removed and distant angle... But before he can get more than just a brief, fleeting impression, it is gone.

Absurdly, on the heels of that near-miss of memory, he finally registers the fact that he is naked. Perversely, it is when he looks around for something to cover himself that he first discovers the body.

Though, taking a closer look at the remains that lay in the sand beside him, that word only barely applied.

Bones are really all that remain, still red with blood and the clinging remnants of flesh, and in such disarray that, without the skull and the ruined evidence of clothing, he probably wouldn't even know they were human. The blood soaking the sand is drying, but there is enough of it to still glint wetly in the growing light. Whoever it was, he doesn't think they could have died much more than a few hours ago...

A few hours ago, it would have been dark, he remembers, and once he does he also remembers that he hadn't been alone. The blood staining the tattered cloth makes it impossible to identify as a uniform or local dress, but he knows one way to be sure.

There is a smell that clings to the scattered bones which tickles the memories that still stubbornly refuse to cooperate, raising a prickle of useless recognition. It stings his nose as he turns over the skull, sharper now as he examines the deep gouges that mar its surface and the jagged rent in the back of it, almost the size of a softball. The edges seem oddly porous, the bone unnaturally soft beneath his fingers.

It is completely empty.

Later, he will pick apart the strange detachment with which he searches the grizzly remains of what once had been a human being—what, at the time, he had thought might have been a member of his unit. With evidence of such a fresh kill sitting in front of him, he knows should be worried about the return of whatever did this...

Too late he will realize why he isn't.

A spark of sunlight catches on silvery metal, calling his eye to what he has been looking for. Blood has dried on the tags, but with the work of his thumbnail he manages to scrape them clean enough. The dirt and blood that remain fill their embossed letters, making them even easier to read.

_ESPOSITO, JAVIER M._  
_681126758USN O POS_  
_CATHOLIC_

A sound echoes through the ravine—a hoarse, wordless shout of horror that he doesn't even realize came from him, the first he has made since waking. And it doesn't fully register until minutes later—after his stiff knees lock up under the sudden effort of a desperate, stumbling run, and after several resulting spills onto the abrasive sands and sharp rocks have scored and scratched his skin bloody, fresh streaks joining the old. He doesn't know how much time has passed or how far he has gone when he finally falters, though he knows with a hideous certainty now that no time or distance will ever be enough to escape this.

He quickly loses track of how long he sits, tucked into the shrinking shade of the ravine, staring at the sand in front of him. There are two sets of tracks before him. He recognizes his own tread quite easily—and he just as easily recognizes the sinuous tracks that all but obliterate them, like the slithering trace of more than a dozen side-winding snakes. Tracks made by the limbs of a creature he doesn't even have a word for, but that, in its own way, is as familiar to him as the man whose name marked the tags which, in his panic, he has left behind.

The sun rises higher in the east, the growing heat beginning to thicken the air and pull sweat from his naked skin. Few things are certain to him, but the one thing he knows is that he cannot survive out here for long, not alone. There are two sets of tracks in the sand, and he must follow one of them eventually.

Two creatures had come this way, he knows, but only one of them is leaving.


End file.
